A couple of Saturdays ago we went to the Natural History Museum. We booked tickets for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition (which was the reason we’d made the trip), and also booked ourselves onto a Spirit Collection Tour. There are a few things-in-jars on display in the new Darwin building, but the 30-minute behind the scenes tour was absolutely AMAZING.
Photo © Natural History Museum
The first room was quite like library storage, full of floor to ceiling grey metal shelves. There was a little map on the end of each row, to show where you are and what’s in each cupboard. We learned that “Xenarthra” is the latin name for the group of mammals that includes sloths, anteaters and armadillos. (There was only one cupboard of those.) My favourite thing was the Victorian onion jar that was full of tiny opposums. Bless. (My least favourite was the stomach contents of a dolphin. Yuk.) Apparently the museum spends a fortune on specialist glassware for the Spirit Collection, so they re-use old jars as often as they can. I’d never seen mammals in a spirit collection before, which was interesting. It hadn’t occurred to me that of course in taxidermy you’re getting rid of all the internal organs and soft tissue, so you need spirit collections to preserve those aspects.
The second room was more like a lab, with shelves around the walls for the jars that are much too big to go in the cupboards. Mostly these contained large fish, or great big snakes in very long, thin jars – hence the need for specialist glassware. There were maybe a dozen enormous closed stainless steel vats, one of which apparently contained a male orangutan that had died recently at a zoo. There were three echinda nestled together in a jar, a rather startled-looking fox, and lots of rays each with a piece of paper tucked inside their gills. The highlight of that room was “Archie” the giant squid. She was stored in a glass tank which ran the entire length of the room. Absolutely amazing. There was also a small cabinet with some of Darwin’s original specimens from the Beagle voyage, which was pretty exciting too.
The tour is free, although you do need to sign up for a ticket in advance. I can’t recommend it highly enough! It’s also inspired me to do some volunteering at my local Zoology Museum, which I’m really looking forward to.